New Fitness Culture Scrapbook #10
This is a collection of five things I found out about in the past week that felt relevant to my work.
They can be read as individual curios, or, as I understand them, as waymarkers towards a more interesting and inclusive culture of fitness.
I don’t intend to just post Bon Appétit videos (though I have been watching them endlessly) but I found this video really interesting - different chefs making “pantry pasta” recipes using ingredients at the back of their cupboards. I loved seeing the overlaps between the different methods. Lots to learn:
I love the design podcast The Observatory, which is built around conversation between Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand.
In the last episode, they spoke about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essay on Self-Reliance. Its topic of the relationship between self and society is a complicating read at a time of lockdown.
The passage about travel in Emerson’s essay has been fun to think about while listening to an audiobook of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘A Time of Gifts’, about his walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople in 1933 when he was eighteen years old.
It’s a fantastic escape. He’ll happily spend four pages describing the inside of a pub, and it’s all imbued with a sort of hazy mythological sparkle that comes from his childhood enthusiasm for the Classics. Proto-psychogeography. It’s perhaps the wrong time of year to be reading it, but it’s still completely glorious.
It’s a passing thing but I love what he says about his experience of sport at public school:
I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.
In it, he mentions Mensur scars (“schmiss”), which I had no idea about! Apparently aristocratic university students in Germany and Austria used to conduct ritualised academic fencing duels, where the goal was to receive wounds without flinching rather than to inflict them. Students would wear the resultant scars as marks of class and honour.
Although the practice has declined, and its current form is pretty different, it is still going on!
Although the principle stays the same: whereas one would formerly engage in a Mensur to be hit, many fencing students of today will rather engage in combat in order to prove their competence by not being wounded, instead focusing on reinforcing the bond between members of the fraternity. Some fraternities that do not practice academic fencing have other rituals that are meant to substitute this ritual of group dynamics, such as extreme hiking.
The historian Hermann Rink explains:
The object and purpose of the Corps was and still is solely the education of students to become a strong, free and cosmopolitan personality who is not held back by religious, racist, national, scientific or philosophical limitations of the mind. Three primary institutions within the fraternity aid with achieving this aim; including the Corpsconvent [regular council meetings of the Corps Brothers], the Kneipe [celebratory get-together of Corps Brothers with speeches, beer and songs], and today's Bestimmungsmensur [the event of academic fencing with sharp blades for the first or one of the first times], where the ones to fence are chosen on the basis of placing two equal opponents in front of each other. [...] This experience, and the intertwined need to overcome one's own fear, dedicated to the union of his Corps, and the connected strengthening of the sense of community aids the personal growth just as does taking a hit without losing one's stand and accepting the assessment of the Mensur by the own Corps Brothers.
To date, only either one or two women have ever lifted the historic Dinnie Stones - the amazing strength historian Jan Todd (possibly, in 1979) and, forty years later (!), Emmajane Smith (in 2019).
Below are photos of both lifts:
